Collectivization in the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union enforced the collectivization (Russian: Коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan, the policy aimed to consolidate individual landholdings and labour into collective farms: mainly kolkhozy and sovkhozy. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927,[1] this problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.[2]

In the early 1930s over 91% of agricultural land became "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets, the sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs. Recent historians have estimated the death toll in the range of six to 13 million.[3]

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land.[4] The Stolypin agricultural reforms between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I, the Russian Provisional Government accomplished little during the difficult World War I months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia on April 16, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Land and Bread," the latter two appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land and a fair share of food for every worker respectively.

During the period of war communism, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka meant that the peasantry was obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers and lead to increased production.

The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government, although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulaks. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed laborers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist), and 82% of the country's population were peasants.[4]

Illustration to the Soviet categories of peasants: bednyaks, or poor peasants; serednyaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the higher-income farmers who had larger farms than most Russian peasants. Published Projector May 1926.

The small shares of most of the peasants resulted in food shortages in the cities, although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates which had produced it for urban markets had been divided up.[4] Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced manufactured goods, the peasants chose to consume their produce rather than sell it, as a result, city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war.[4] Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).[5]

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions."[6] Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain).[7] Social and ideological goals would also be served through mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.

This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas; in 1928 there was a 2-million-ton shortfall in grains purchased by the Soviet Union from neighbouring markets. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.

The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928, and again the government resorted to requisitions, much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.[citation needed]

The caption reads KULAK. The propaganda identifies whom to blame in the middle of the Soviet Grain Procurement Crisis of 1928.

Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.

agricultural artel (initially in a loose meaning, later formalized to become an organizational basis of kolkhozes, via The Standard Statute of an Agricultural Artel adopted by Sovnarkom in March 1930);

Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.

In November 1929, the Central Committee decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes, this marked the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps; in response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.

Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic first five-year plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.[4]

The situation changed incredibly quickly in the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60% almost overnight.

To assist collectivization, the Party decided to send 25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers to the countryside, this was accomplished during 1929–1933, and these workers have become known as twenty-five-thousanders ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulaks and their "agents".

Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture, it was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor (called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.

The means of production (land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots were allowed for.

Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.

The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.[9]

The collection of grain from Kolkhozes in spite of the apparent resistance of "kulaks".

The new kolkhozy were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as gigantomania, they were planned to be "divided into 'economies (ekonomii)' of 5,000 – 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages – the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..."[citation needed] Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.

In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes, the giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.[10]

The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930 issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:

It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivized. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivization by more than 100 per cent.... some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision.

After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930, but soon collectivisation was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.

Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivization, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labor and its rewards[clarification needed]. In fact, however, rural areas did not have many landless peasants, given the wholesale redistribution of land following the Revolution. Alternatively, for those with property, collectivization meant forfeiting land up to the collective farms and selling most of the harvest to the state at minimal prices set by the state itself. This, in turn, engendered opposition to the idea. Furthermore, collectivization involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short time frame, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in the village obshchina or mir, the changes were even more dramatic in other places, such as in Ukraine, with its tradition of individual farming, in the Soviet republics of Central Asia, and in the trans-Volgasteppes, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.

YCLers seizing grain from "kulaks" which was hidden in the graveyard, Ukraine

Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world.[11] By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz) voluntary, the drive to collectivize came without peasant support.[12] The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it.[13] Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists.[14][15] Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was the result of "passive resistance … which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest"; in his words, "[w]hole tracts were left unsown,... [and as much as] 50 per cent [of the crop] was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing".[16] Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these acts.[17] Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.

Kulak Chernov is accused for hiding the grain and sentenced by the Court to 1 year of labor camp, followed by three years of re-settlement. His private property was confiscated.

Rumors circulated in the villages warning the rural residents that collectivization would bring disorder, hunger, famine, and the destruction of crops and livestock.[18] Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labeled collectivization as a second serfdom.[19][20] Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine.[21] More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission, the level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices, the serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom.[22] To them, this “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm which to some extent promoted communist policies.

Women were the primary vehicle for rumors that touched upon issues of family and everyday life.[23] Fears that collectivization would result in the socialization of children, the export of women’s hair, communal wife-sharing, and the notorious common blanket affected many women, causing them to revolt, for example, when it was announced that a collective farm in Crimea would become a commune and that the children would be socialized, women killed their soon-to-be socialized livestock, which spared the children. Stories that the Communists believed short hair gave women a more urban and industrial look insulted peasant women,[24] after local activists in a village in North Caucasus actually confiscated all blankets, more fear dispersed among villagers. The common blanket meant that all men and women would sleep on a seven-hundred meter long bed under a seven-hundred-meter long blanket.[25] Historians argue that women took advantage of these rumors without actually believing them so they could attack the collective farm “under the guise of irrational, nonpolitical protest.”[26] Women were less vulnerable to retaliation than peasant men, and therefore able to get away with a lot more.[27]

Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests, they “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulaks, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet and setting fire to their homes, the men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment, because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.[28]

Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. [21] Associating the church with the tsarist regime,[29] the Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression,[30] they cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools.[29] Peasants began to associate Communists with atheists because the attack on the church was so devastating,[30] the Communist assault on religion and the church angered many peasants, giving them more reason to revolt. Riots exploded after the closing of churches as early as 1929.[31]

Identification of Soviet power with the Antichrist also decreased peasant support for the Soviet regime. Rumors about religious persecution spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations.[32] Priests preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants.[33] and that the Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for Hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist,[34] they faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state,[35] these rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.[36]

Due to high government production quotas, peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms.[37] In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half, the subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II and the severe drought of 1946. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs,[38] the numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.[38]

Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.

The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia and Kazakhstan into exile settlements, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps.[39][40]

On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets ("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.

The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs[citation needed]. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people,[40] it is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin confided to Winston Churchillat Yalta that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization.[41]

Since the second half of the 19th century, Siberia had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai, Omsk Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast, Kemerovo Oblast, Khakassia, Irkutsk Oblast). Stolypin's program of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.[42]

In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region.[43] The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).

It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.[44]

In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakhstan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on migration proved ineffective and half a million migrated to other regions of Central Asia and 1.5 million to China.[45] Of those who remained, as many as a million died in the resulting famine;[46] in Mongolia, a so-called 'Soviet dependency', attempted collectivization was abandoned in 1932 after the loss of 8 million head of livestock.[47]

Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization and the resistance of the peasants significantly contributed to the Great Famine of 1932–1933, especially in Ukraine, a region famous for its rich soil (chernozem). This particular period is called "Holodomor" in Ukrainian, during the similar famines of 1921–1923, numerous campaigns – inside the country, as well as internationally – were held to raise money and food in support of the population of the affected regions. Nothing similar was done during the drought of 1932–1933, mainly because the information about the disaster was suppressed by Stalin.[48] Stalin also undertook a purge of the Ukrainian communists and intelligentsia, with devastating long-term effects on the area.[49] Many Ukrainian villages were blacklisted and penalized by government decree for perceived sabotage of food supplies.[50] Moreover, migration of population from the affected areas was restricted.[51][52] According to Stalin in his conversation with the prize-winning writer Mikhail Sholokhov, the famine was caused by the excesses of local party workers and sabotage,

I've thanked you for the letters, as they expose a sore in our Party-Soviet work and show how our workers, wishing to curb the enemy, sometimes unwittingly hit friends and descend to sadism. ... the esteemed grain-growers of your district (and not only of your district alone) carried on an 'Italian strike' (sabotage!) and were not loath to leave the workers and the Red Army without bread. That the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without blood) does not change the fact that the esteemed grain-growers waged what was in fact a 'quiet' war against Soviet power. A war of starvation, dear com[rade] Sholokhov. This, of course, can in no way justify the outrages, which, as you assure me, have been committed by our workers. ... And those guilty of those outrages must be duly punished.[53][54]

About 40 million people were affected by the food shortages including areas near Moscow where mortality rates increased by 50%,[55] the center of the famine, however, was Ukraine and surrounding regions, including the Don, the Kuban, the Northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan where the toll was one million dead. The countryside was affected more than cities, but 120,000 died in Kharkiv, 40,000 in Krasnodar and 20,000 in Stavropol.[55]

The declassified Soviet archives show that there were 1.54 million officially registered deaths in Ukraine from famine.[56]Alec Nove claims that registration of deaths largely ceased in many areas during the famine.[57] However, it's been pointed out that the registered deaths in the archives were substantially revised by the demographics officials, the older version of the data showed 600,000 fewer deaths in Ukraine than the current, revised statistics.[56] In The Black Book of Communism, the authors claim the number of dead was at least 4 million, and characterize the Great Famine as "a genocide of the Ukrainian people".[58][59]

After the Soviet Occupation of Latvia in June 1940, the country's new rulers were faced with a problem: the agricultural reforms of the inter-war period had expanded individual holdings, the property of "enemies of the people" and refugees, as well as those above 30 hectares, was nationalised in 1940–44, but those who were still landless were then given plots of 15 hectares each. Thus, Latvian agriculture remained essentially dependent on personal smallholdings, making central planning difficult; in 1940–41 the Communist Party repeatedly said that collectivization would not occur forcibly, but rather voluntarily and by example. To encourage collectivization high taxes were enforced and new farms given no government support, but after 1945 the Party dropped its restrained approach as the voluntary approach was not yielding results. Latvians were accustomed to individual holdings (viensētas), which had existed even during serfdom, and for many farmers the plots awarded to them by the interwar reforms were the first their families had ever owned. Furthermore, the countryside was filled with rumours regarding the harshness of collective farm life.

Pressure from Moscow to collectivize continued and the authorities in Latvia sought to reduce the number of individual farmers (increasingly labelled kulaki or budži) through higher taxes and requisitioning of agricultural products for state use. The first kolkhoz was established only in November 1946 and by 1948, just 617 kolkhozes had been established, integrating 13,814 individual farmsteads (12.6% of the total). The process was still judged too slow, and in March 1949 just under 13,000 kulak families as well as a large number of individuals were identified. Between March 24 and March 30, 1949, about 40,000 people were deported and resettled at various points throughout the USSR.

After these deportations, the pace of collectivization increased as a flood of farmers rushed into kolkhozes. Within two weeks 1740 new kolkhozes were established and by the end of 1950, just 4.5% of Latvian farmsteads remained outside the collectivized units; about 226,900 farmsteads belonged to collectives, of which there were now around 14,700. Rural life changed as farmers' daily movements were dictated to by plans, decisions and quotas formulated elsewhere and delivered through an intermediate non-farming hierarchy, the new kolkhozes, especially smaller ones, were ill-equipped and poor – at first farmers were paid once a year in kind and then in cash, but salaries were very small and at times farmers went unpaid or even ended up owing money to the kholhoz. Farmers still had small pieces of land (not larger than 0.5 ha) around their houses where they grew food for themselves. Along with collectivization, the government tried to uproot the custom of living in individual farmsteads by resettling people in villages, however this process failed due to lack of money since the Soviets planned to move houses as well.[60][61]

The official numbers for collectivized area (the column with percent of sown area in collective use in the table above) are biased upward by two technical factors. First, these official numbers are calculated as percent of sown area in peasant farmsteads, excluding the area cultivated by sovkhozes and other agricultural users. Estimates based on total sown area (including state farms) reduce the share of collective farms between 1935–1940 to about 80%. Second, the household plots of kolkhoz members (i.e., collectivized farmsteads) are included in the land base of collective farms. Without the household plots, arable land in collective cultivation in 1940 was 96.4% of land in collective farms, and not 99.8% as shown by official statistics. Although there is no arguing with the fact that collectivization was sweeping and total between 1928 and 1940, the table below provides different (more realistic) numbers on the extent of collectivization of sown areas.

During World War II, Alfred Rosenberg, in his capacity as the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms in areas of the USSR under German occupation. He also issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming, restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers, but decollectivization conflicted with the wider demands of wartime food production, and Hermann Göring demanded that the kolkhoz be retained, save for a change of name. Hitler himself denounced the redistribution of land as 'stupid.'[62][63] In the end, the German occupation authorities retained most of the kolkhozes and simply renamed them "community farms" (Russian: obshchinnye khoziaystva, a throwback to the traditional Russian commune). German propaganda described this as a preparatory step toward ultimate dissolution of the kolkhozes into private farms, which would be granted to peasants who had loyally delivered compulsory quotas of farm produce to the Germans. By 1943, the German occupation authorities had converted 30% of the kolkhozes into German-sponsored "agricultural cooperatives", but as yet had made no conversions to private farms.[64][65]

^James W. Heinzen, "Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929", University of Pittsburgh Press (2004) ISBN0-8229-4215-1, Chapter 1, "A False Start: The Birth and Early Activities of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, 1917–1920"

1.
Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
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The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, also referred to as Soviet Uzbekistan or the Republic of Uzbekistan was one of the republics of the Soviet Union existed from 1924 to 1991. It was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Communist Party, from 1990 to 1991, it was the sovereign part of the Soviet Union with its own legislation. Beginning 20 June 1990, Uzbek SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty within its borders, Islam Karimov became the republics inaugural president. On 31 August 1991, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was renamed the Republic of Uzbekistan, a doubly landlocked Soviet republic in Central Asia. Uzbekistan was bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Tajikistan to the southeast, Kirghizia to the northeast, Afghanistan to the south, the name, Uzbekistan, literally means Home of the Free, taken from an amalgamation of uz, bek, and -stan. Officially, the name Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was the name as defined by its 1937 and 1978 Constitutions. In 1924, the borders of political units in Central Asia were changed along ethnic lines determined by Vladimir Lenin’s Commissar for Nationalities, the next year Uzbekistan became one of the republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1928, the collectivization of land into state farms was initiated, Uzbekistan included the Tajik ASSR until 1929, when the Tajik ASSR was upgraded to an equal status. In 1930, the Uzbek SSR capital was relocated from Samarkand to Tashkent, in 1936, Uzbekistan was enlarged with the addition of the Karakalpak ASSR taken from the Kazakh SSR in the last stages of the national delimitation in the Soviet Union. That same year in December, it was renamed to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, further bits and pieces of territory were transferred several times between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan after World War II. In 1937–38, during the Great Purge, a number of alleged nationalists were executed, including Faizullah Khojaev, during World War II, many industries were relocated to Uzbekistan from vulnerable locations in western regions of the USSR to keep them safe. Large numbers of Russians, Ukrainians and other nationalities accompanied the factories and this included large numbers of ethnic Koreans, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens. During the Soviet period, Islam became a point for the anti-religious drives of Communist authorities. The government closed most mosques, and religious schools became anti-religious museums, on the positive side was the virtual elimination of illiteracy, even in rural areas. Only a small percentage of the population was literate before 1917, another major development, one with future catastrophic impact, was the drive initiated in the early 1960s to substantially increase cotton production in the republic. This drive led to overzealous irrigation withdrawals of irrigation water from the Amu Darya, towards the end of the Soviet–Afghan War, several troops crossed the Uzbek border from Afghanistan as part of the its withdrawal on 15 February 1989. The Communist Party was the legal party in the Uzbek SSR until 1990. The first secretary, or head, of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan was consistently an Uzbek, long-time leader of the Uzbek SSR was Sharof Rashidov, head of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan from 1959 to 1983

2.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi

3.
Agricultural sector
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The primary sector of the economy is the sector of an economy making direct use of natural resources. This includes agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining, in contrast, the secondary sector produces manufactured goods, and the tertiary sector provides services. The primary sector is usually most important in less-developed countries, primary industry is a larger sector in developing countries, for instance, animal husbandry is more common in Africa than in Japan. Mining in 19th-century South Wales provides a study of how an economy can come to rely on one form of activity. Canada is unusual among developed countries in the importance of its sector, with the logging. However, in recent years, the number of exchanges have heavily reduced Canadas primary industry. In developed countries primary industry has become more advanced, for instance the mechanization of farming as opposed to hand picking and planting. In more developed economies additional capital is invested in primary means of production, developed countries are allowed to maintain and develop their primary industries even further due to the excess wealth. For instance, European Union agricultural subsidies provide buffers for the inflation rates and prices of agricultural produce. This allows developed countries to be able to export their products at extraordinarily low prices. This makes them extremely competitive against those of poor or underdeveloped countries that maintain free market policies, such differences also come about due to more efficient production in developed economies, given farm machinery, better information available to farmers, and often larger scale. Three-sector hypothesis Resource curse Dwight H. Perkins, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, Vol.31, No

4.
Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues

5.
First five-year plan
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The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a list of economic goals, created by General Secretary Joseph Stalin and based on his policy of Socialism in One Country. It was implemented between 1928 and 1932, in 1929, Stalin edited the plan to include the creation of kolkhoz collective farming systems that stretched over thousands of acres of land and had hundreds of peasants working on them. This disruption led to a famine in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan as well as areas of the Northern Caucasus. Despite the ruinous loss of life, the introduction of collective farms allowed peasants to use tractors to farm the land, unlike before when most had been too poor to own a tractor. Public machine and tractor stations were set up throughout the USSR, peasants were allowed to sell any surplus food from the land. However, the government planners failed to notice of local situations. In 1932, grain production was 32% below average, to add to this problem, agricultural production was so disrupted that famine broke out in several districts. Because of the reliance on rapid industrialization, major cultural changes had to occur in tandem. As this new social structure arose, conflicts occurred among some of the majority of the populations, in Turkmenistan, for example, the Soviet policy of collectivization shifted their production from cotton to food products. Prior to the enactment of the first Soviet five-year plan, the Soviet Union had been experiencing threats from external sources. The first war threat emerged from the East in 1924 and this war scare arose when Western nations, like Great Britain, began cutting off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. This created fear among the Soviets that the West was preparing to attack the Soviet Union again, during the Russian Civil War, foreign powers had occupied portions of Soviet territory. The fear of invasion from the west left the Soviets feeling a need for rapid industrialization to increase Soviet war making potential, at the same time as the war scare of 1927, dissatisfaction among the peasantry was emerging in the Soviet Union. This dissatisfaction arose from the famine of the early 1920s, as well as a growing mistreatment of the peasants, also during this time the secret police or the NKVD had begun rounding up political dissenters in the Soviet Union. The central aspect of the first Soviet five-year plan was the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, the need for rapid industrialization was once again out of the fear of impending war from the West. If war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the West, the Soviets would be fighting against some of the most industrialized nations in the world, the rapid industrialization would inhibit fears of being left unprotected if War between the Soviets and the West were to occur. To meet the needs of a war, the Soviet leaders set unrealistic quotas for production. To meet those needs, the facilities had to be constructed to quickly facilitate material production before goods could be produced

6.
Collective farming
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Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise. This type of collective is often an agricultural cooperative in which member-owners engage jointly in farming activities, the process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been state-run and cooperative-run variants, for example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy, often denoted in English as collective farms and state farms, respectively. In general, collective farming is contrasted with family farming and with arrangements in which land was owned by landlords or aristocrats. Notable examples of collective farming include the kolkhozy that dominated Soviet agriculture between 1930 and 1991 and the Israeli kibbutzim, both are collective farms based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labour and income in accordance with the theoretical principles of cooperative organizations. They differ radically, however, in the application of the cooperative principles relative to freedom of choice, a small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly-managed piece of land is surely one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history. This has co-existed with, and competed with, more forms of ownership. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world, the process by which Western Europes communal land became private is a fundamental question behind views of property, is it the legacy of historical injustices and crimes. Karl Marx believed that what he called primitive communism was ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation, by contrast Libertarian thinkers say that by the homestead principle, whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner. A calpulli consisted of a number of extended families with a presumed common ancestor. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it, the Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals, the Huron had as much land as they need. As a result, the Huron could give families their own land, any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate, once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. The Iroquois had a communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation, the land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned, land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the womens job to cultivate food and not the mens. The Clan Mothers Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans, food from such lands, called kěndiǔgwǎge hodiyěntho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings

7.
Kolkhoz
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A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz, the 1920s were characterized by spontaneous emergence of collective farms, under influence of traveling propaganda workers. Initially a collective farm resembled a version of the traditional Russian commune, the generic farming association, the association for joint cultivation of land. This gradual shift to farming in the first 15 years after the October Revolution was turned into a violent stampede during the forced collectivization campaign that began in 1928. The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, suggesting collective ownership, on the other hand, sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство, suggesting state ownership. As a collective farm, a kolkhoz was legally organized as a production cooperative, the Standard Charter of a kolkhoz, which since the early 1930s had the force of law in the USSR, is a model of cooperative principles in print. It speaks of the kolkhoz as a form of agricultural cooperative of peasants that voluntarily unite for the purpose of joint agricultural production based on collective labor. Importantly, remuneration had always been in proportion to labor and not from residual profits, implying that members were treated as employees and they imposed detailed work programs and nominated their preferred managerial candidates. Since the mid-1930s, the kolkhozes had been in effect an offshoot of the state sector, nevertheless, in locations with particularly good land or if it happened to have capable management, some kolkhozes accumulated substantial sums of money in their bank accounts. Subsequently, numerous kolkhozes were formally nationalized by changing their status to sovkhozes, essentially, his administration recognized their status as hired hands rather than authentic cooperative members. The guaranteed wage provision was incorporated in the 1969 version of the Standard Charter, the question of internal organization was important in the new kolkhozes. The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, by July 1929 it was already normal practice for the large kolkhoz of 200-400 households to be divided into temporary or permanent work units of 15-30 households. The brigade was headed by a brigade leader and this was usually a local man. After the kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950 the territorial successor of the old village kolkhoz was the complex brigade, brigades could be subdivided into smaller units called zvenos for carrying out some or all of their tasks. See collectivisation in the USSR and agriculture in the Soviet Union for general discussion of Soviet agriculture. In a kolkhoz, a member, called a kolkhoznik, received a share of the product and profit according to the number of days worked. In practice, most kolkhozy did not pay their members in cash at all. In 1946,30 percent of kolkhozy paid no cash for labor at all,10.6 paid no grain, in addition the kolkhoz was required to sell its grain crop and other products to the State at fixed prices

8.
Leadership
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Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill encompassing the ability of an individual or organization to lead or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations. The literature debates various viewpoints, contrasting Eastern and Western approaches to leadership, US academic environments define leadership as a process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. Leadership seen from a European and non-academic perspective encompasses a view of a leader who can be moved not only by communitarian goals but also by the search for personal power. Studies of leadership have produced theories involving traits, situational interaction, function, behavior, power, vision and values, charisma, the search for the characteristics or traits of leaders has continued for centuries. Philosophical writings from Platos Republic to Plutarchs Lives have explored the question What qualities distinguish an individual as a leader, underlying this search was the early recognition of the importance of leadership and the assumption that leadership is rooted in the characteristics that certain individuals possess. This idea that leadership is based on individual attributes is known as the theory of leadership. In Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle identified the talents, skills, galtons Hereditary Genius examined leadership qualities in the families of powerful men. After showing that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when his focus moved from first-degree to second-degree relatives, in other words, leaders were born, not developed. Both of these notable works lent great initial support for the notion that leadership is rooted in characteristics of a leader, international networks of such leaders could help to promote international understanding and help render war impossible. This vision of leadership underlay the creation of the Rhodes Scholarships, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, a series of qualitative reviews of these studies prompted researchers to take a drastically different view of the driving forces behind leadership. Subsequently, leadership was no longer characterized as an individual trait, as situational approaches posited that individuals can be effective in certain situations. The focus then shifted away from traits of leaders to an investigation of the behaviors that were effective. Additionally, during the 1980s statistical advances allowed researchers to conduct meta-analyses and this advent allowed trait theorists to create a comprehensive picture of previous leadership research rather than rely on the qualitative reviews of the past. Equipped with new methods, leadership researchers revealed the following, Individuals can and do emerge as leaders across a variety of situations, fail to consider patterns or integrations of multiple attributes. Do not distinguish between those leader attributes that are generally not malleable over time and those that are shaped by, do not consider how stable leader attributes account for the behavioral diversity necessary for effective leadership. Considering the criticisms of the theory outlined above, several researchers have begun to adopt a different perspective of leader individual differences—the leader attribute pattern approach. David McClelland, for example, posited that leadership takes a strong personality with a well-developed positive ego, to lead, self-confidence and high self-esteem are useful, perhaps even essential. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lipitt, and Ralph White developed in 1939 the seminal work on the influence of leadership styles, the researchers evaluated the performance of groups of eleven-year-old boys under different types of work climate

9.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states

10.
Dekulakization
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Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929–1932. The richer peasants were labeled kulaks and considered class enemies, more than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and this policy was accomplished simultaneously with collectivization in the USSR and effectively brought all agriculture and peasants in Soviet Russia under state control. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class was announced by Joseph Stalin on 27 December 1929, the decision was formalized in a resolution On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization on 30 January 1930. OGPU secret police chief Efim Georgievich Evdokimov organized and supervised the roundup of peasants, the results were soon known outside the Soviet Union. In 1941, the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker wrote It is an estimate to say that some 5,000,000. Died at once, or within a few years, red Terror Decossackization Population transfer in the Soviet Union Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union Collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

11.
Political repression in the Soviet Union
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Throughout the history of the Soviet Union tens of millions of people became victims of political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. Its heritage still influences the life of modern Russia and other former Soviet states, early on, the Leninist view of the class struggle and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat provided the theoretical basis of the repressions. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of Russian SFSR, at times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary executions, sending innocent people to Gulag, forced resettlement, at certain times, all members of a family, including children, were punished as traitor of the Motherland family-members. Repression was conducted by the Cheka and its successors, and other state organs, periods of the increased repression include Red Terror, Collectivisation, the Great Purges, the Doctors Plot, and others. The secret-police forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions, Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, including the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. During the Tambov rebellion Tukhachevsky allegedly authorized Bolshevik military forces to use weapons against villages with civilian population. Prominent citizens of villages were taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender. Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests, the Red Terror was officially announced on September 2,1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However Sergei Melgunov applies this term to repressions for the period of the Russian Civil War. Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to individual land and labour into collective farms. As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, in his conversation with Winston Churchill Stalin gave his estimate of the number of kulaks who were repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported. The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937-1938. Estimates of the number of associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 2 million. In Soviet Union, political repressions targeted not only individual persons, in most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas. Entire nations and ethnic groups were punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II. Population transfer in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths from the inflicted hardships, koreans and Romanians were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people and this led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area

12.
Red Terror
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The Red Terror was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression conducted by the Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. Soviet historiography describes the Red Terror as having officially announced in September 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov. However, the term was applied to political repression during the whole period of the Civil War. The Cheka conducted the mass repressions, estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 10,000 to over one and a half million. The original Red Terror was a campaign against perceived counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921. Leon Trotsky described the context in 1920, The severity of the dictatorship in Russia. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges. A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror, the bitter struggle was described succinctly from the Bolshevik point of view by Grigory Zinoviev in mid-September 1918, To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russias population, as for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed, It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror, anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to concentration camp. There followed the decree On Red Terror, issued on 5 September 1918 by the Cheka, on 15 October, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii, summing up the officially ended Red Terror, reported that in Petrograd 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Casualties in the first two months were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of executed people published in newspaper Cheka Weekly. The list could go on and on and they had been promised amnesty if they would surrender. This is one of the largest massacres in the Civil War, on 16 March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, which numbered 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, and put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army

13.
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries

14.
Gulag
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The Gulag was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalins rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agencys full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and it was administered first by the State Political Administration, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s, the author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on folklore as opposed to objective facts. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates and 423 labor colonies in the USSR, todays major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners. About 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953, according to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of more than 465,000 were political prisoners. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG and its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system, the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both systems were similar, hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. According with the estimates, in total, during the period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the period from 1929 to 1953. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time

15.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
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There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called psychopathological mechanisms of dissent, Article 58-10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, Anti-Soviet agitation, was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In 1967 a weaker law, Article 190-1 Dissemination of fabrications known to be false and these laws were frequently applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness, developed by Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky. Together they established a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offence, the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent. The Russian Federation acknowledged that before 1991 psychiatry had been used for political purposes and it entails the exculpation and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon political rather than mental health-based criteria. Many authors, including psychiatrists, also use the terms Soviet political psychiatry or punitive psychiatry to refer to this phenomenon, Psychiatry possesses an inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can in itself be regarded as oppressive, Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times classified threats to authority during periods of political disturbance. In many countries political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. In the Soviet Union dissidents were often confined in the so-called psikhushka, Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for mental hospital. One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan, in 1939 it was transferred to the control of the NKVD on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. International human rights such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia in political dissenters. Western scholars examined no aspect of Soviet psychiatry as thoroughly as its involvement in the control of political dissenters. As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine, Russian psychiatrist Pyotr Gannushkin also believed that in a class society, especially during the most severe class struggle, psychiatry was incapable of not being repressive. A system of abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalins regime. Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however, the GULag, or Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, was an effective instrument of political repression

16.
Religion in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union was established by the Bolsheviks in 1922, in place of the Russian Empire. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply integrated into the autocratic state and this was a significant factor that contributed to the Bolshevik attitude to religion and the steps they took to control it. Under the doctrine of atheism in the Soviet Union, there was a government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism conducted by Communists. In 1925 the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution, science was counterposed to religious superstition in the media and in academic writing. The main religions of pre-revolutionary Russia persisted throughout the entire Soviet period, generally, this meant that believers were free to worship in private and in their respective religious buildings, but public displays of religion outside of such designated areas were prohibited. In addition, religious institutions were not allowed to express their views in any type of mass media, as the founder of the Soviet state, V. I. Lenin, put it, Religion is the opium of the people, marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Christians belonged to various churches, Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist, the majority of the Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni. Other religions, practiced by a number of believers, included Buddhism and Shamanism. Orthodox Christians constituted a majority of believers in the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s, three Orthodox churches claimed substantial memberships there, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. They were members of the confederation of Orthodox churches in the world. The first two functioned openly and were tolerated by the regime, but the Ukrainian AOC was not permitted to function openly. According to both Soviet and Western sources, in the late 1980s the Russian Orthodox Church had over 50 million believers, over 4,000 of these churches were located in the Ukrainian Republic. The distribution of the six monasteries and ten convents of the Russian Orthodox Church was equally disproportionate, only two of the monasteries were located in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Another two were in Ukraine and there was one each in Belarus and Lithuania, seven convents were located in Ukraine and one each in Moldova, Estonia, and Latvia. The Georgian Orthodox Church, another member of Eastern Orthodoxy, was headed by a Georgian patriarch. In the late 1980s it had 15 bishops,180 priests,200 parishes, in 1811 the Georgian Orthodox Church was incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church, but it regained its independence in 1917, after the fall of the Tsar. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church did not officially recognize its independence until 1943, the Ukrainian AOC separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1919, when the short-lived Ukrainian state adopted a decree declaring autocephaly from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

17.
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
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Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, there were periods where Soviet authorities suppressed and persecuted various forms of Christianity to different extents depending on State interests. Soviet Marxist-Leninism policy consistently advocated the control, suppression, and ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs, the state advocated the destruction of religion, and it officially pronounced religious beliefs to be superstitious and backward. In 1925 the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution, the total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million. The Soviet regime had a commitment to the complete annihilation of religious institutions. Militant meant an uncompromising attitude toward religion and the effort of winning the hearts, Militant atheism became central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority policy of all Soviet leaders. Convinced atheists were considered to be politically astute and virtuous individuals. The state established atheism as the only scientific truth, Soviet authorities forbade the criticism of atheism and agnosticism until 1936 or of the states anti-religious policies, such criticism could lead to forced retirement. Soviet law never officially outlawed the holding of religious views, the persecution of religion took place officially through many legal measures designed to hamper religious activities, through a large volume of anti-religious propaganda, and through education. In practice the state sought to control religious bodies and to interfere with them. To this effect, the sought to control the activities of the leaders of the different religious communities. Religious believers always found themselves subject to propaganda and legislation that restricted religious practice. They frequently suffered restrictions within Soviet society, rarely, however, did the Soviet state officially ever subject them to arrest, imprisonment or death simply for holding beliefs. Instead, the methods of persecution represented a reaction to the perception of their resistance to the broader campaign against religion. The tactics varied over the years and became more moderate or more harsh at different times, among common tactics included confiscating church property, ridiculing religion, harassing believers, and propagating atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. Many Orthodox were also subjected to punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them to give up their religious convictions. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops, many others were imprisoned or exiled. In the Soviet Union, in addition to the closing and destruction of churches

18.
Islam in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union was a state comprising fifteen communist republics which existed from 1922 until its dissolution into a series of separate nation states in 1991. Of these fifteen republics, six had a Muslim majority, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, the Bolsheviks wanted to include as much as possible of the former Russian Empire within the Soviet Union. This meant they were faced with a number of contradictions as they set out to establish the Soviet Union in regions with strong Islamic influences, although actively encouraging atheism, Soviet authorities permitted limited religious activity in all the Muslim republics. Mosques functioned in most large cities of the Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, however, the government also announced plans to permit training of limited numbers of Muslim religious leaders in courses of two- and five-year duration in Ufa and Baku, respectively. In the late 1980s, Islam had the second largest number of believers in the Soviet Union, all working mosques, religious schools, and Islamic publications were supervised by four spiritual directorates established by Soviet authorities to provide governmental control. The Spiritual Directorate for Transcaucasia dealt with both Sunni and Shia Muslims, the overwhelming majority of the Muslims were Sunnis, only about 10 percent, most of whom lived in the Azerbaijan, were Shias. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Christian church, the Muslims of the Soviet Union originally encountered a larger degree of freedom under the new Bolshevik rule. Under the Tsars, Muslims were brutally repressed and the Eastern Orthodox Church was the official religion, know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution. See Basmachi movement Left-wing socialists in the Muslim areas of the former tsarist empire developed a variant of communism that continued in the USSR until 1928. The Muslims believed the fate of world revolution depended on events in Asia not Europe and they also argued alliances with the national bourgeoisie were necessary for the duration of the liberation struggle. Revolutionary activity along the Soviet Unions southern border, Soviet decision makers recognized, would draw the attention of capitalist powers and it also happened in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Young Bukharians. When Joseph Stalin consolidated power in the half of the 1920s. Mosques were closed or turned into warehouses throughout Central Asia, religious leaders were persecuted, religious schools were closed down and Waqfs were outlawed. The Soviet government took the veil that the women wore as evidence that the Muslim women were oppressed. This backfired, and the became more popular than ever among the workers, whereas prior to this was mostly used by the middle. Stalins cult of personality left virtually no place for any religious sentiment, during World War II, particularly in 1943-44, the Soviet government conducted a series of deportations to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion were the reasons for these deportations. Six of the seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus that were deported, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, Karachays, severe incidental losses of life were incurred during and after these deportations

19.
Censorship in the Soviet Union
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Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced. The Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books, only special collections, accessible by special permit granted by the KGB, contained old and politically incorrect material. Towards the end of Soviet rule, perestroika led to loosened restrictions on information, Soviet books and journals also disappeared from libraries according to changes in Soviet history. Often Soviet citizens preferred to destroy politically incorrect publications and photos, works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June—6,1922, to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while Anti-Westernization and nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over the Holodomor, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. ”As peasant uprisings defined pre-World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. ”Since Stalin regularly read Pravda, which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey Pravda’s advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an author’s pandering to Stalin’s tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding them. With the start of the Cold War a curse on the Anti-Westernization was proclaimed, religious intolerance and atheism was another goal of post-World War II censorship, and was an extension of Anti-Westernization. In the childrens novel Virgin Soil Upturned, references to God making mist out of tears shed by the poor, the “Khrushchev Thaw beginning in 1953 with Stalins death brought liberation of previously banned literature, and greater liberty to the authors writing during this time. Glavlit’s authority to censor literature decreased after they became attached to the USSR Council of Ministers in 1953. ”Anti-Westernization was also suppressed, however, censorship was not completely absent from this era. Emmanuil Kazakevich’s 1962 novel, Spring on the Oder, was injected in 1963 with descriptions of American bigotry, selfishness. These examples of Anti-Westernization indicate that works were still expurgated for propaganda, repressed persons were routinely removed not only from texts, but also from photos, posters and paintings. Censorship of film was commonplace since the USSR’s inception, beginning with the Russian Civil War, censoring film effectively advanced socialist realism, a mode of art production that positively portrays socialism and constituents of socialist nations. Film censorship peaked during the rule of Stalin, acting as the chief censor for films, Stalin was demanding meticulous revisions in a way befitting his interpretation, as if a co-author. One famous letter Stalin wrote to Alexander Dovzhenko pertained to The Great Citizen, Stalins letter made several intrusive revisions on the characters, props, and vital scenes such that the entire film needed restructuring. More moderate cases were recorded, such as a picture by Ivan Pyryev, however, movies which Stalin thought did not cohere with socialist realism were denied being released to the public, The Party Card was not such a film. This picture’s screenplay was written during the time of a campaign to renew individual party cards

20.
Censorship of images in the Soviet Union
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Censorship of images in the Soviet Union was widespread in the USSR. The USSR curtailed access to pornography, which was prohibited by Soviet law. While nude shots appeared in a number of Soviet films before the glasnost reform of the 1980s, pornographic images and videotapes were smuggled into the Soviet Union for illegal distribution. In addition to the law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade. This image taken by the Moscow Canal was taken when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar, after he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and had his image removed by the censors. Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg on May 1,1895 and he joined the Bolsheviks on May 5,1917, in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War 1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army, after February 1922, he worked in the political system, rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control, in 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism, this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges. He became Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26,1936, yezhovs crimes were discovered and on April 10,1939, he was arrested. On February 4,1940, he was executed, on May 5,1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, the photo was later altered and both were removed by censors. Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian-born ethnically-Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist and he was also among the first members of the Politburo. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge, trotskys ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. On November 7,1919, this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution. After Trotsky and his allies fell from power, a number of figures were removed from the image, including Trotsky, Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox housewife. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1901 and its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in August 1903. He climbed the ranks of the Soviet leadership and was briefly the head of the Soviet state in 1917. They were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit moral complicity in Kirovs assassination, zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Kamenev to five years in prison

21.
Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
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The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire. The success of the Soviet Union in dealing with this legacy of antisemitism. This culminated in the so-called Doctors plot, in which a group of doctors had allegedly conspired to murder Stalin, there were also numerous antisemitic publications of the era which gained widespread circulation. This stance was retained by the later Bolshevik governments, the October Revolution abolished the laws which regarded the Jews as an outlawed people. Several prominent members of Soviet government institutions and the Communist Party came from Jewish backgrounds, the Council of Peoples Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. At the same time, religious traditions among the Jewish population were suppressed, in August 1919 Jewish properties, including synagogues, were seized and many Jewish communities were dissolved. The anti-religious laws against all expressions of religion and religious education were being taken out on all religious groups, many Rabbis and other religious officials were forced to resign from their posts under the threat of violent persecution. This type of persecution continued on into the 1920s, in March 1919, Vladimir Lenin delivered a speech On Anti-Jewish Pogroms in a gramophone recording. Lenin sought to explain the phenomenon of antisemitism in Marxist terms, according to Lenin, antisemitism was an attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews. Stalin has been accused of resorting to antisemitism in some of his arguments against Trotsky and those who knew Stalin, such as Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a Jewish faction and a true Russian faction in Bolshevism, Stalins secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenins death. Its also possible that Stalins attitudes towards Trotsky, a Russian Jew, Stalin adopted antisemitic policies which were reinforced with his anti-Westernism. Antisemitism in the Soviet Union commenced openly as a campaign against the rootless cosmopolitan, in this campaign against the rootless cosmopolitan, many leading Jewish writers and artists were killed. Terms like rootless cosmopolitans, bourgeois cosmopolitans, and individuals devoid of nation or tribe appeared in newspapers, the Soviet press accused the Jews of groveling before the West, helping American imperialism, slavish imitation of bourgeois culture and bourgeois aestheticism. Victimization of Jews in the USSR at the hands of the Nazis was denied, Jewish scholars were removed from the sciences, the Stalinist antisemitic campaign ultimately culminated in the Doctors plot in 1953. According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors plot was clearly aimed at the liquidation of Jewish cultural life. Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in Jewish world conspiracy, immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967 the antisemitic conditions started causing desire to emigrate to Israel for many Soviet Jews. A Jewish Ukrainian radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky sought to move to Israel, in a letter to Brezhnev, Kochubeivsky stated, Within the week he was called in to the KGB bureau and without questioning, was taken to a mental institution in his hometown of Kiev

22.
Holodomor
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The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an officially estimated 7 million to 10 million people. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, during the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. Early estimates of the toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million, the exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included. Older estimates are often cited in political commentary. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement, the word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means death by hunger, or to kill by hunger, to starve to death. Sometimes the expression is translated into English as murder by hunger or starvation, Holodomor is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod meaning hunger and mor meaning plague. The expression moryty holodom means to inflict death by hunger, the Ukrainian verb moryty means to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody. The perfective form of the verb moryty is zamoryty – kill or drive to death by hunger, the word was used in print as early as 1978 by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada. However, in the Soviet Union – of which Ukraine was a constituent republic – references to the famine were controlled, historians could speak only of food difficulties, and the use of the very word golod/holod was forbidden. Discussion of the Holodomor became more open as part of Glasnost in the late 1980s, the term may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, in his article on the topic. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, the term is described as artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a countrys population. The famine had been predicted as far back as 1930 by academics and advisers to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic government, between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by 6. 6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16. 9% and 11. 7%, respectively. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in town were cut back, and in the winter of 1932–33. The urban workers were supplied by a system, but rations were gradually cut, and by the spring of 1933. The first reports of malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kiev oblasts

23.
Polish Operation of the NKVD
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It was ordered by the Politburo against the so-called Polish spies and customarily interpreted by the NKVD officials as relating to absolutely all Poles. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 ethnic Poles, the operation was implemented according to NKVD Order №00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov. The majority of the victims were ethnically Polish but not all, according to Timothy Snyder, the remainder were suspected of being Polish, without further inquiry. In order to speed up the process the NKVD personnel reviewed local telephone books, in Leningrad alone, almost 7,000 citizens were rounded up this way. A vast majority of such nominal suspects were executed within 10 days of arrest, the Polish Operation was the largest ethnic shooting and deportation action during the Great Terror campaign of political murders in the Soviet Union, orchestrated by Nikolai Yezhov. The top secret NKVD Order No and it was distributed to the local subdivisions of the NKVD simultaneously with Yezhovs thirty-page secret letter, explaining what the Polish operation was all about. The letter was entitled, On fascist-resurrectionist, spying, diversional, defeationist, stalin demanded the NKVD to keep on digging out and cleaning out this Polish filth. The Order also established simplified the so-called album procedure, the long lists of prisoners condemned by the lower NKVD organs during the initial investigations, were collected into albums and sent to the midrange NKVD offices for a stamp of approval. After the approval of the album the executions were carried out immediately. This procedure was used in other mass operations of the NKVD. Another possible cause according to Snyder might have sprung from the necessity to explain the Soviet-made famine in Ukraine which required a political scapegoat, a top Soviet official Vsevolod Balitsky chose the Polish Military Organization which was disbanded in 1921. The NKVD declared that it continued to exist, some Soviet Poles were tortured in order to confess to its existence, and denounce other individuals as spies. Meanwhile, the Communist International helped by revisiting its files in search of Polish members, the largest group of people with Polish background, around 40 percent of all victims, came from the Soviet Ukraine, especially from the districts near the border with Poland. Among them were tens of thousands of peasants, railway workers, an additional 17 percent of victims came from the Soviet Byelorussia. The following categories of people were arrested by the NKVD during its Polish operation, as described in Soviet documents, former and present members of the Polish Socialist Party and other non-communist Polish political parties. All prisoners of war from the Polish-Soviet war remaining in the Soviet Union, members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa listed in the special list. The operation took place approximately from August 25,1937 to November 15,1938. According to archives of the NKVD,111,091 Poles and people accused of ties with Poland, were sentenced to death and this number constitutes 10% of the total number of people officially convicted during the Yezhovshchina period, based on confirming NKVD documents

24.
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
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In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas. This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR and it has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people. Kulaks were a group of relatively affluent farmers and had gone by this term in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia. They were the most numerous group deported by the Soviet Union, resettlement of people officially designated as kulaks continued until early 1950, including several major waves. Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990,1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521, during the 1930s, categorisation of so-called enemies of the people shifted from the usual Marxist–Leninist, class-based terms, such as kulak, to ethnic-based ones. Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union led to an escalation in Soviet ethnic cleansing. Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics, by some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. The deportations started with Poles from Byelorussia, Ukraine and European Russia 1932-1936, koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding German invasion that marked the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. During 1939-19411.45 million people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63. 1% were Poles, previously it was believed that about 1. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 1.5 million people were deported, the same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940-1953, in addition, at least 75,000 were sent to the Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps, in 1989, native Latvians represented only 52% of the population of their own country. In Estonia, the figure was 62%, likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldovia had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000. During World War II, particularly in 1943-44, the Soviet government conducted a series of deportations, some 1.9 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics

25.
Emancipation of the serfs in 1861
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The Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia was the first and most important of liberal reforms effected during the reign of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. The reform effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire, the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of the domestic serfs. By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty, serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords, household serfs were the least affected, they gained only their freedom and no land. In Georgia the emancipation took place later, in 1864, the serfs were emancipated in 1861, following a speech given by Tsar Alexander II on 30 March 1856. State owned serfs, i. e. the serfs living on Imperial lands, were emancipated later in 1866 and they comprised an estimated 38% of the population. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, by the mid-nineteenth century, less than half of Russian peasants were serfs. The rural population lived in households, gathered as villages, run by a mir —isolated, conservative, largely self-sufficient, Imperial Russia had around 20 million dvory, forty percent of them containing six to ten people. Intensely insular, the mir assembly, the skhod, appointed an elder, peasants within a mir shared land and resources. The fields were divided among the families as nadel —a complex of strip plots, the strips were periodically redistributed within the villages to produce level economic conditions. The peasants were duty-bound to make payments in labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income, the need for urgent reform was well understood in 19th-century Russia. Much support for it emanated from universities, authors and other intellectual circles, various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky, Nikolay Mordvinov, and Pavel Kiselyov. However, conservative or reactionary nobility thwarted their efforts, in Western guberniyas serfdom was abolished early in the century. In Congress Poland, serfdom had been abolished before it became Russian, Serfdom was abolished in the Governorate of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819. In 1797, Paul I of Russia decreed that corvee labor was limited to 3 days a week, but his law was not enforced. Beginning in 1801, Alexander I of Russia appointed a committee to study possible emancipation and my intention is to abolish serfdom. You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged and it is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below

26.
World War I
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany

27.
Russian Provisional Government
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The Russian Provisional Government was a provisional government of the Russian Republic established immediately following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire on 2 March 1917. The intention of the government was the organization of elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly. The provisional government lasted approximately eight months, and ceased to exist when the Bolsheviks seized power after the October Revolution in October 1917. According to Harold Whitmore Williams the history of eight months during which Russia was ruled by the Provisional Government was the history of the steady and systematic disorganisation of the army. The Provisional Government was formed in Petrograd by the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and was led first by Prince Georgy Lvov and it replaced the institution of the Council of Ministers of Russia, members of which after the February Revolution presided in the Chief Office of Admiralty. At the same time the Russian Emperor Nicholas II abdicated in favor of the Grand Duke Michael who agreed that he would accept after the decision of Russian Constituent Assembly, the Provisional Government was unable to make decisive policy decisions due to political factionalism and a breakdown of state structures. This weakness left the government open to challenges from both the right and the left. The weakness of the Provisional Government is perhaps best reflected in the nickname given to Kerensky. The authority of the Tsars government began disintegrating on 1 November 1916, Stürmer was succeeded by Alexander Trepov and Nikolai Golitsyn, both Prime Ministers for only a few weeks. During the February Revolution two rival institutions, the Imperial Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, both located in the Tauride Palace, competed for power. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March and Milyukov announced the decision to offer the Regency to his brother. Grand Duke Michael did not want to take the poisoned chalice, public announcement of the formation of the Provisional Government was made. It was published in Izvestia the day after its formation, the announcement stated the declaration of government Full and immediate amnesty on all issues political and religious, including, terrorist acts, military uprisings, and agrarian crimes etc. Freedom of word, press, unions, assemblies, and strikes with spread of political freedoms to military servicemen within the restrictions allowed by military-technical conditions, abolition of all hereditary, religious, and national class restrictions. Immediate preparations for the convocation on basis of universal, equal, secret, and direct vote for the Constituent Assembly which will determine the form of government, replacement of the police with a public militsiya and its elected chairmanship subordinated to the local authorities. Elections to the authorities of local self-government on basis of universal, direct, equal, non-disarmament and non-withdrawal out of Petrograd the military units participating in the revolution movement. Under preservation of strict discipline in ranks and performing a military service - elimination of all restrictions for soldiers in the use of rights granted to all other citizens. It also said, The provisional government feels obliged to add that it is not intended to take advantage of circumstances for any delay in implementing the above reforms

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Obshchina
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Obshchina or Mir or Selskoye obshestvo (Russian, Cельское общество were peasant village communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy, the vast majority of Russian peasants held their land in communal ownership within a mir community, which acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable land was divided in sections based on quality and distance from the village. Each household had the right to one or more strips from each section depending on the number of adults in the household. The purpose of this allocation was not so much social as it was practical, strips were periodically re-allocated on the basis of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the ability of households to pay their taxes, a detailed statistical description of the Russian village commune was provided by Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov. Communal land ownership of the Mir predated serfdom, surviving emancipation, until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the mir could either contain serfs or free peasants. In the first case lands reserved for use were assigned to the mir for allocation by the proprietor. Even after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a peasant in his everyday work normally had little independence from obshchina, among its duties were control and redistribution of the common land and forest, levying recruits for military service, and imposing punishments for minor crimes. Obshchina was also responsible for taxes underpaid by members. This type of shared responsibility was known as krugovaya poruka, although the meaning of this expression has changed over time. In 1905, repartitional tenure didnt exist in the Baltic provinces but was used by a quarter of western and southwestern peasants, the institution was effectively destroyed by the Stolypin agrarian reforms, the implementation of which would lead to the Russian Revolution and subsequent collectivization of the USSR. The organization of the peasant mode of production is the cause for the type of social structure found in the Obshchina. In the Obshchina alliances were formed primarily through marriage and common descent of kin, usually the eldest members of the household made up the Mir to govern the redistribution of land. The families came together to form a community that depended on making more equitable. In addition the system had residual communal rights, sharing exchanges during shortages as well as certain distributive exchanges. Furthermore the structure defined by these alliances and risk-sharing measures were regulated by scheduling, howe writes, the traditional calendar of the Russian peasants was a guide for day-to-day living. Peasants formed a class apart, largely excepted from the incidence of the ordinary law, the assembly of the mir consists of all the peasant householders of the village

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Vladimir Lenin
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party socialist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism, born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brothers execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empires Tsarist regime and he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, after his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, Lenins government was led by the Bolsheviks—now renamed the Communist Party—with some powers initially also held by elected soviets. It redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry, opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign orchestrated by the state security services, tens of thousands were killed and others interned in concentration camps. Anti-Bolshevik armies, established by both right and left-wing groups, were defeated in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin promoted economic growth through a mixed economic system. Seeking to promote world revolution, Lenins government created the Communist International, waged the Polish–Soviet War, in increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his Gorki mansion. He became a figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Lenins father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs, his origins remain unclear, with suggestions being made that he was Russian, Chuvash, Mordvin. Despite this lower-class background he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated and from a prosperous background, she was the daughter of a German–Swedish woman. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the governments plans for modernisation. His dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, the couple had two children, Anna and Alexander, before Lenin—who would gain the childhood nickname of Volodya—was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870, and baptised several days later. They were followed by three children, Olga, Dmitry, and Maria. Two later siblings died in infancy, Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria – a Lutheran – was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children. Every summer they holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino

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Russian Civil War
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The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war in the former Russian Empire immediately after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russias political future. In addition, rival militant socialists and nonideological Green armies fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, eight foreign nations intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied Forces and the pro-German armies. The Red Army defeated the White Armed Forces of South Russia in Ukraine, the remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920. Lesser battles of the war continued on the periphery for two years, and minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces in the Far East continued well into 1923. Armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934, there were an estimated 7,000, 000–12,000,000 casualties during the war, mostly civilians. The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen, many pro-independence movements emerged after the break-up of the Russian Empire and fought in the war. Several parts of the former Russian Empire—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the rest of the former Russian Empire was consolidated into the Soviet Union shortly afterwards. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government was established during the February Revolution of 1917, Political commissars were appointed to each unit of the army to maintain morale and ensure loyalty. In June 1918, when it became apparent that an army composed solely of workers would be far too small. Former Tsarist officers were utilized as military specialists, sometimes their families were taken hostage in order to ensure their loyalty, at the start of the war three-quarters of the Red Army officer corps was composed of former Tsarist officers. By its end, 83% of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers, a Ukrainian nationalist movement was active in Ukraine during the war. More significant was the emergence of an anarchist political and military movement known as the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the Anarchist Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, some of the military forces were set up on the basis of clandestine officers organizations in the cities. The Czechoslovak Legions had been part of the Russian army and numbered around 30,000 troops by October 1917 and they had an agreement with the new Bolshevik government to be evacuated from the Eastern Front via the port of Vladivostok to France. The transport from the Eastern Front to Vladivostok slowed down in the chaos, under pressure from the Central Powers, Trotsky ordered the disarming and arrest of the legionaries, which created tensions with the Bolsheviks. The Western Allies armed and supported opponents of the Bolsheviks, hence, many of these countries expressed their support for the Whites, including the provision of troops and supplies. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle, the British and French had supported Russia during World War I on a massive scale with war materials. After the treaty, it looked like much of material would fall into the hands of the Germans. Under this pretext began allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the United Kingdom, there were violent clashes with troops loyal to the Bolsheviks

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New Economic Policy
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The New Economic Policy was an economic policy of Soviet Russia proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who described it as a progression towards state capitalism within the workers state of the USSR. ”The NEP represented a more capitalism-oriented economic policy, deemed necessary after the Russian Civil War of 1917 to 1922, to foster the economy of the country, which was almost ruined. In addition, the NEP abolished prodrazvyorstka and introduced prodnalog, a tax on farmers, other policies included the monetary reform and the attraction of foreign capital. The NEP policy created a new category of people called NEPmen, Joseph Stalin abolished the New Economic Policy in 1928. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of most of Russia and this led to the Russian Civil War, pitting the Bolsheviks against the Whites and other counter-revolutionary forces. During this period, the Bolsheviks attempted to administer Russias economy purely by decree, farmers and factory workers were ordered to produce, and food and goods were seized and issued by decree. While this policy enabled the Bolshevik regime to overcome some difficulties, it soon caused disruptions. Producers who were not directly compensated for their labor often stopped working, leading to widespread shortages, combined with the devastation of the war, these were major hardships for the Russian people and diminished popular support for the Bolsheviks. At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks controlled cities, although the fighting was nearly all outside urban areas, urban populations decreased substantially. The war disrupted transportation, and basic public services, shipments of food and fuel by railroad and water dramatically decreased. City residents first experienced a shortage of heating oil, then coal, populations in northern towns declined an average of 24%. Northern towns were more deprived of food than towns in the agricultural south, petrograd alone lost 850,000 people, half of the urban population decline during the Civil War. Hunger and poor conditions drove residents out of cities, workers migrated south to get peasants surpluses. Recent migrants to cities left because they still had ties to villages, urban workers formed the Bolshevik base of support, so the exodus posed a serious problem. Factory production severely slowed or halted, factories lacked 30,000 workers in 1919. To survive, city dwellers sold personal valuables, made artisan craft goods for sale or barter, the acute need for food drove them to obtain 50%–60% of food through illegal trading. The shortage of cash caused the market to use a barter system. Drought and frost led to the Russian famine of 1921, in which millions starved to death, especially in the Volga region, when no bread arrived in Moscow in 1921, workers became hungry and disillusioned. They organised demonstrations against the Partys policy of privileged rations, in which the Red Army, Party members, the Kronstadt rebellion of soldiers and sailors broke out in March 1921, fueled by anarchism and populism

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Marxism
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It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat through the alienation of labor, Marxism has since developed into different branches and schools of thought, and there is now no single definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has been adopted by a number of academics and theorists working in various disciplines. Critics have taken issue with particular Marxist claims or accused Marxism as a whole of being inconsistent, refuted based on new information. The Marxian analysis begins with an analysis of the material conditions, the economic system and these social relations form a base and superstructure. As forces of production, most notably technology, improve, existing forms of social organization become inefficient, from forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution and these inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society in the form of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materializes between the minority who own the means of production, and the vast majority of the population who produce goods, the socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanitys mode of production through workers revolution. According to Marxism, especially arising from crisis theory, socialism is a historical necessity, in a socialist society private property, in the form of the means of production, would be replaced by co-operative ownership. A socialist economy would not base production on the creation of private profits, Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. The historical materialist theory of history analyses the causes of societal development. All constituent features of a society are assumed to stem from economic activity, the base and superstructure metaphor portrays the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, The sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society and this relationship is reflexive, at first the base gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization. As Friedrich Engels clarified, The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production. Primitive Communism, as in tribal societies. Slave Society, a development of tribal to city-state, aristocracy is born, feudalism, aristocrats are the ruling class, merchants evolve into capitalists. Capitalism, capitalists are the class, who create and employ the proletariat. According to the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the content of Marxism was Marxs economic doctrine

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Capitalism
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Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, economists, political economists, and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism, different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social policies. Most existing capitalist economies are mixed economies, which elements of free markets with state intervention. Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in different times, places. Following the decline of mercantilism, mixed capitalist systems became dominant in the Western world, Capitalism has been criticized for prioritizing profit over social good, natural resources, and the environment, and that is a cause of inequality and economic instabilities. Supporters believe that it provides better products through competition, and creates strong economic growth, the term capitalist, meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term capitalism. It dates back to the mid-17th century, capitalist is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning head – also the origin of chattel and cattle in the sense of movable property. Capitale emerged in the 12th to 13th centuries in the sense of referring to funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, by 1283 it was used in the sense of the capital assets of a trading firm. It was frequently interchanged with a number of other words – wealth, money, funds, goods, assets, property, the Hollandische Mercurius uses capitalists in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital. In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788, six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France, David Ricardo, in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, referred to the capitalist many times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term capitalist in his first work, What is Property. To refer to the owners of capital, benjamin Disraeli used the term capitalist in his 1845 work Sybil. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the capitalistic system. And to the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital, the use of the word capitalism in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Das Kapital, p.124, and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p.493. Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism but instead those of capitalist, and capitalist mode of production, also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the phrase private capitalism in 1863. Capital has existed incipiently on a scale for centuries, in the form of merchant, renting and lending activities. Simple commodity exchange, and consequently simple commodity production, which are the basis for the growth of capital from trade, have a very long history

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Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated in English as CPSU, was the founding and ruling political party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The party was founded in 1912 by the Bolsheviks, a group led by Vladimir Lenin which seized power in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. The party was dissolved on 29 August 1991 on Soviet territory soon after a failed coup détat and was abolished on 6 November 1991 on Russian territory. The highest body within the CPSU was the party Congress, which convened every five years, when the Congress was not in session, the Central Committee was the highest body. Because the Central Committee met twice a year, most day-to-day duties and responsibilities were vested in the Politburo, the Secretariat, and the Orgburo. The party leader was the head of government and held the office of either General Secretary, Premier or head of state, or some of the three offices concurrently—but never all three at the same time. The CPSU, according to its party statute, adhered to Marxism–Leninism, a based on the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. The party pursued state socialism, under which all industries were nationalized, a number of causes contributed to CPSUs loss of control and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some historians have written that Gorbachevs policy of glasnost was the root cause, Gorbachev maintained that perestroika without glasnost was doomed to failure anyway. Others have blamed the stagnation and subsequent loss of faith by the general populace in communist ideology. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first constitutionally socialist state, was established by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Immediately after the Revolution, the new, Lenin-led government implemented socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates, in this context, in 1918, RSDLP became Russian Communist Party and remained so until 1997. Lenin supported world revolution he sought peace with the Central Powers. The treaty was voided after the Allied victory in World War I, in 1921, Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism that started the process of industrialization and recovery from the Civil War. On 30 December 1922, the Russian SFSR joined former territories of the Russian Empire in the Soviet Union, on 9 March 1923, Lenin suffered a stroke, which incapacitated him and effectively ended his role in government. He died on 21 January 1924 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, after emerging victorious from a power struggle with Trotsky, Stalin obtained full control of the party and Stalinism was installed as the only ideology of the party. The partys official name was All-Union Communist Party in 1925, Stalins political purge greatly affected the partys configuration, as many party members were executed or sentenced for slave labour. Happening during the timespan of the Great Purge, fascism had ascened to power in Italy, seeing this as a potential threat, the Party actively sought to form collective security alliances with Anti-fascist western powers such as France and Britain